Biotech, Red in Tooth and Claw

Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the
New Frontiers of Life. Lee M. Silver. xvi + 444 pp.
HarperCollins, 2006. $26.95.

The conflict between religion and science is one of the greatest
stories ever told. It is a chivalric war, centuries old—a
grand and ceremonious fight between two camps, each of which
believes itself self-evidently on the side of right. With John
William Draper's magisterial three-volume work of 1875, History
of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, a canonical
narrative began to emerge. In it, science, as the expression of
reason, eroded the cultural power of religion, as the embodiment of
superstition and dogmatism. Copernicus removed the Earth from the
center of the cosmos. Darwin lowered man to the level of the animals
and eliminated God from creation. And more recently, Watson and
Crick opened the door to engineering life, turning us into God Himself.

The story contains a kernel of truth, but the history of science is
more than the conquering of spiritual darkness by the light of
reason. Both religion and science have mixed legacies; both have
done harm as well as good. And both tend to be most dangerous when
they become dogmatic and intolerant, and when they confuse faith
with knowledge.

Strange to say, but Challenging Nature, a new book by
Princeton molecular biologist Lee M. Silver, shows a Victorian
perspective on science versus religion to be ideally suited to
cheerleading for modern biotechnology and genomics. Silver uses the
unreconstructed science-religion conflict as a foil for that
old-time scientism: the belief that true knowledge can come only
from natural science and that technology can therefore solve all
social problems. So convinced is he that technology—especially
biotechnology—is good for what ails us that he can see only
one reason someone would disagree: Any opponents of biotechnology,
he says, must be blinded by spirituality.

Other modern-day scientific fundamentalists, such as Richard Dawkins
and Daniel Dennett, tend to confine themselves to particular
debates, such as anti-evolutionism. But Silver takes on all comers:
clean-cut pro-life vigilantes of the Religious Right, bearded and
Birkenstocked tree-huggers and whale-savers, European
"Frankenfood" protesters, cloning opponents, homeopaths
and a rogue's gallery of mystics, mountebanks and dewy-eyed
do-gooders. The book is therefore refreshingly undogmatic
politically, and there is much to agree with as Silver attacks
biological knee-jerkism on all sides. Ideologically, however, he is
as doctrinaire as his opponents. He dismisses opposition as
ignorance, skepticism as superstition, doubt as sentimentality.

Silver begins with a quick tour of the religious or spiritual
beliefs of various cultures, from Indonesia to Latin America to his
local rabbi and a Christian friend. Religious belief is universal,
he shows, and so diverse and relative that the concept of God or
gods can only be a human invention, created to explain that which we
cannot understand. He then introduces science as the antithesis of
spirituality: objective, unbiased, based only on facts, free of
belief or dogma. It is an old-fashioned positivist account, straight
out of Draper's 1875 text. For decades now, historians have been
adding texture and perspective to this cartoon version of science,
revealing it as a complex, social human activity—grounded in
empirical observation, to be sure, but also conditioned by politics,
economics and, yes, belief.

The core belief of science, of course, is that the supernatural is
superfluous. The fact that science involves belief does not
invalidate the enterprise; the risk is not in keeping the faith but
in failing to recognize it. That failure marks the scientistic True
Believer, the dogmatist. "I simply don't have ‘faith' in
anything," Silver writes.

He then turns his materialist eye toward a wide range of beliefs
about the natural world. With lawyerly ruthlessness, he examines
questions of the soul: Who has got one, and when does he get it?
Silver makes a neat argument here. He shows how blurry are the
borders of the individual, using Siamese twins, split-brain
patients, cultured cell lines, artificially fertilized embryos and
teratomas as examples. He challenges believers to identify the
moment when the individual becomes ensouled. One cannot reconcile
biological reality with belief in a soul, he concludes.

Yet, he continues, insistence on some version of a supernatural
vital spirit not only persists, it seems to be growing in magnitude
and spreading across the political spectrum. Conservatives tend to
favor strict Christian interpretations, and many on the left have
adopted what he calles a post-Christian stance that ascribes a vital
spirit to some vaguely defined "Mother Nature."

This makes for some mighty strange bedfellows in the fights against
pesticides and fertilizers, genetically modified food, environmental
degradation and reproductive technologies. In all these cases,
Silver argues, an emotional attachment to one or another notion of
spirit leads to irrational protests that often run counter to the
interests of the protesters themselves.

Give him an "A" for effort: He goes to extraordinary
lengths to force reality to fit his conclusion. He portrays his
opponents in the weakest light, considering only their flimsiest
arguments and knocking down straw men. For example, in his sometimes
trenchant critique of organic farming, he implies that the entire
modern enterprise is infected with the mysticism of Rudolf Steiner
(the 19th-century German philosopher and educator who coined the
term), ignoring the many hard-headed and scientific organic farmers
today. Wilderness preservation is a futile exercise, he says,
because no place on Earth is untouched by human influence. He paints
biodiversity as a useless concept, because politically correct
liberals stump for it without understanding ecology. Supplemental
vitamins are pointless because most people meet the recommended
daily allowances in their normal diet. He ridicules "the
assumption made in the 1970s . . . that each time a species went
extinct, an ecosystem became less healthy"—a patently
absurd view, which Silver presents without attribution. He admits of
no genuinely thorny issues; his opponents are all ignorant or
misguided and his solutions are all simple, once you see his side.

A vision of nature straight out of Tennyson complements Silver's
Victorian picture of science and religion. For Silver, nature is red
in tooth and claw, a vast and vicious competition among selfish
individuals and among selfish genes. The only alternative he
presents to this view is a new-age-y image of trans-species
collaboration and a "central biospheric authority."
Scientists, however, have cultivated a broad middle ground between
these extremes. Behavioral ecologists have shown that cooperation
often plays a significant role in an ecosystem. Coevolution is the
norm in parasite-host relationships. The mature Gaia hypothesis,
which Silver dismisses as mere spiritualism, in fact generates
testable, materialist hypotheses about the emergence of
self-regulation in complex systems. Research in such areas has,
interestingly enough, tracked the rise in the proportion of women in
science in recent decades.

Silver needs such a macho, 19th-century view of nature to support
his oddly Biblical vision of man's dominion. If nature is ruthless
and cruel, then it is our duty to subdue it, to bend it to our
needs. The first step in this process was the invention of
agriculture 10,000 years ago. In an eye-poppingly ahistorical
passage, Silver attributes this invention to "the abstract
concept of genes" entering "the tribal
consciousness." Gregor Mendel, eat your heart out.

Such passages would be funny if they did not lead to such
frightening conclusions. Silver sees the history of technology as a
story of uninterrupted progress in quality of life—without
recognizing the parallel histories of environmental and
sociopolitical impacts. He laughs off the highest extinction rates
in the history of the planet, countering with the non sequitur that
extinction can also occur without human intervention. He presents
the Green Revolution of the 1970s as a remarkable achievement in
raising food production and reducing starvation. It was all that,
but it also made farmers more dependent on corporate agribusiness,
and it increased water and soil pollution due to the use of
pesticides and fertilizers. He waves away the enormous and
inherently unforeseeable risks involved in human genetic engineering
(not to mention the mixed consequences of globalization), writing
"It's nice to hope that a single globalized human society will
provide the means for all people . . . to live free and healthful
lives, taking advantage of the benefits that biotechnology and other
technologies can provide." ("Pollyannan : one who is unduly optimistic or achieves happiness
through self-delusion"—Oxford English Dictionary)

Silver despairs of romantics who wish to improve health and save
nature by reducing our dependence on technology. The only solution
to our current environmental and health problems, he argues, is to
adopt a full-throated engineering approach to nature, both human and
organic. He envisions a comprehensive climate-control program in
which we would dial up our ideal annual rainfall and temperature
cycles, regulate growing seasons and decide which regions are going
to be deserts, which lush forests and which fertile grasslands. He
imagines the same oversight in the obstetric wards: Parents will
design their offspring's qualities, perhaps ticking off desired
traits on a checklist, eliminating diseases and enhancing abilities.
Silver insists that we not let sentimental attachment to some
vaporous ideal of pure nature or spirit stand in the way of creating
true happiness and harmony with technology.

The problem is that we don't know what we don't know. Like reading
glasses, technology magnifies and sharpens the near field but makes
the distance blurry. The history of science and technology is
stuffed with examples of shortsightedness and unintended
consequences. Just after 1900, when Mendel's laws of heredity came
to light, geneticists thought that they now had enough knowledge to
take control of human evolution. Their false confidence contributed
to a eugenics movement that sterilized thousands of Americans and
provided the blueprint for the Nazi race-hygiene program. Similarly,
no one intended to melt the icecaps, decimate wildlife populations,
fill fish with mercury or wreathe our cities in toxic chemicals.
Those things have happened accidentally, as the long-term effects of
short-term solutions. Such disasters might have been lessened had we
been more aware of our own ignorance. Humility in the face of
nature's complexity is not spiritualism. It is realism.